>It's not like there's an intrinsic reason TCP packets are the way they are now, it's largely an arbitrary choice that we standardized on. This is incredibly o

>It's not like there's an intrinsic reason TCP packets are the way they are now, it's largely an arbitrary choice that we standardized on. This is incredibly off-base. There was a huge effort to force an OSI-designed networking protocol stack that was designed by a committee of government bureaucrats and big blue sales engineers. It was a total disaster, but the vast amount of resources that were dedicated to forcing the OSI memes was in the billions of dollars. Large amounts of actual physical hardware were produced conforming to protocol standards nobody doing anything real actually wanted to use because a lot of government agencies required all network equipment to be compatible with the OSI protocol stack. TCP, UDP, and the modern routing protocols (BGP, OSPF, etc) and their associated address resolution systems were not an arbitrary choice -- they represented orders of magnitude level improvements over the government-backed OSI standards and getting them to succeed was the product of intense collective effort of some of the most brilliant minds of the past century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars